tricksters and villains apply within

I LOOOooooooooooooooooooooVED Pacific Rim. Listen until Wonder Woman came out, the Pacific Rim theme was my ring tone. (Now it's the WW theme if that wasn't clear.) My love for it was only partially because of my love for Idris Elba in pretty much every role he's ever in, the other part was the depth Guillermo del Toro put into what was essentially a robots vs. monsters movie. Good old GdT doesn't do sequels and the writer Travis Beacham didn't return for Uprising... but I know how to go into a movie with low-to-middling expectations, so that's what I did. I'm not going to go into detail here, this is after all supposed to be spoiler-free. But, I will say that if you're going into this movie for a lot of plot... or science... or solid ties to the original... you might not find what you're looking for. But if you, like me, are going into Uprising looking for a robots vs robots or robots vs kaiju extravaganza, well, buckle up and prepare for a good...

I've loved poetry since I was a kid. My family had some old collection of children's poems and songs, some of which were common and most of which weren't. I got a collection of "Best Loved Poetry" from my grandparents pretty young from their much larger collection of classic books with matching bindings. At every point in my life there's been at least one book of poems on my bookshelves, usually more than one. Love of poetry also led me into a love of quotations and I used to build notebooks full of quotes based on songs and stories and poems. Eventually I started writing my own poetry, like any teenager full of emotion they're inept at showing outwardly. I still have most of it, though it is admittedly horrible and full of conservative Christian beliefs and symbology because that's the world I grew up in. It's funny, I didn't believe the godly stuff I added to my poems but the more people reading my poems, the more I added because I thought ...

I think you have to have been living under a rock not to know what the NPR Music Tiny Desk Concerts art. So you don't need me to explain how good they can be to find new music or to see good indie musicians do what they do in an intimate setting. And the setlist isn't tight or too defined, the musicians can talk or riff or whatever makes them feel the music or connected to the small audience in the office at the time. I'm not an NPR fan and I don't watch every new Tiny Desk video when it goes up, but every now and again something will catch my eye. Last year's winner of the Tiny Desk Contest was a band called Tank and the Bangas. The video went up pretty much a year ago yesterday and it's 20+ minutes of good fun. Their music is hip hop soul with a big voice and really hefty lyrics. I fell in love pretty much immediately, listened to all the songs I could find and then sent the video out to all of my friends. They were in town for a Tedx youth conference rece...

From my time putting together things for a Dragon Age RP board, I've built up quite a collection of Pinterest boards for both characters and ships. Since starting though, my collection has expanded quite a bit to literature, podcasts and other media I enjoy. These days, I'm pretty sure you can tell exactly how much I'm into a thing by what boards I've created. My boards are themed in a way, characters assigned cards from both major and minor arcana from the tarot, as well as the lenormand cards. (As a note, I started doing this long before the Major Arcana for Critical Role S1 was ever announced so my cards don't match the characters, and I refuse to adjust them to match.) I tend to pick and choose characters that I like best, I've never created a full spectrum of boards for all the characters in a thing. I never put together a full list of boards for Critical Role S1 characters. And yet, Critical Role S2 totally made me want a board for each one of the ch...

I'm very much not the demographic for Dodie Clark's YouTube career, or even probably her music. But I find her honest and charming and her music utterly delightful. I appreciate her communication about her struggles with mental illness and her ability to put them on camera. I love the lyrics to her songs because they feel like they come from a real place and were I a younger adult, I'd likely find them highly applicable to my own feelings. Instead of sort of wistfully nostalgic. Actually I find myself somewhere between the two on most days and dodie's sweet, soft voice is a good remedy for when you find yourself more wistfully nostalgic than tragically and seemingly unceasingly young. (For me, anyway.)

If you need something to watch for a few hours, do yourself a favor and watched Netflix new show, Nailed It. I'm not a huge fan of baking or cooking shows, but there really needs to be more than six episodes of Nailed It. Or at least there's a promise for a second season. Nailed It is a baking show for home bakers who... aren't really very good, or experienced. There are three challengers in each show, and two challenges. The first challenge, Baker's Choice, gives the baker's a chance to pick from one of three similarly decorated treats to try and recreate. They're given between 45-50 minutes to attempt the recreation and then judged on both sight and taste. The winner of Baker's Choice gets a prize (a stand mixer in several episodes) and the chance to wear a bright gold chef's hat for the second round signifying that they're the one to beat. In the second round, they start from scratch and all three are tasked with recreating an amazing cake ...

I'd planned to take my little sister out to see Love, Simon tonight but it was nearly a sold out show, which rarely happens at our theater. So, rather than wait for a later show, we went to see Tomb Raider instead. I wasn't sure what to expect, I've seem some pretty cynical reviews and some really shitty ones from manbabies that care more about the size of Lara's chest than anything else in the movie. Taking everything I've heard with a huge grain of salt, I thought we'd check it out. I was never a fan of the early Tomb Raider games, they felt unnecessarily difficult and way too focused on Lara's appearance (they were). In recent years with the reboot of the video game series, I decided to check them out again. And I fell in love with Lara, the story, the game play. They're fantastic games. A little bit open-world, a little bit puzzle-platformer, a little rpg. They've got good story, good puzzles and a great protagonist. I've never really gotte...

Typically I read a lot of fantasy, modern (read: urban) and low-magic, but I also love a good historical fiction or horror novel. As not picky as I am about music, I tend to be pretty particular about the stuff I read. But lately, I've been a little tired of fiction, finding it difficult to get through the ends of books if it slows down even a little. I talked a little bit about it when I talked about reading Mamrie's book. But since then I've picked up a few other memoir/non-fiction/celebrity kind of books to read. They tend to be a little short reads, but since they're typically set up in short chapters/stories as well it feels like they're faster too. I finished Scrappy Little Nobody by Anna Kendrick today. Memoir isn't really the right word but it's sort of a collection of her stories of getting into show business and the business of being a sort of an anxiety-ridden misanthrope. I'm a fan of her work both musicals and movies, I even saw Camp, whic...

As big of a fan as I am of music, I'm not the sort of person that hates on covers. Obviously I've recommended at least one here before. But lest that not accurately portray my love of covers, let me make it clear here and now. I LOVE covers, even bad ones, even cheesy ones. I love hearing someone else's take on music I know really, really well. Sometimes they bring a sound to the music that I find interesting, sometimes they change the music in a way that brings out lyrics I hadn't noticed before, sometimes it's just a new way for me to fall in love with the song all over again. Sure, not ever cover is great and I might just listen to it once and pass by. But sometimes I might decide that I like the cover better than original. It's all good in the cover game. So then let me tell you how much I love Scary Pockets. They're a funk band doing what Scott Bradlee did with Postmodern Jukebox (if you ask who? um... go figure that out and come back to me). They...

I really dislike having a boring desk at work. I have to actually WORK there for 8+ hours a day, every now and again I like looking around at my work area and finding something that'll make me smile. And let's be honest, Funko Pop figures have sort of changed the whole game when it comes to desk or cube decoration. Here's my basic set up: From L to R: Loki (from the first Thor movie, Superman, Maleficent, La Muerta & Harley Quinn. In front is a smaller lip balm Maleficent. If you think it's odd that picture has more than one Maleficent in it, you don't know me very well. There's always at least one near me at all times (except the bathrooms -- someday that might change). I'll have to go into my love for Maleficent another day. Anyway, yes. I purposefully arranged them in a villain, hero, villain, hero format. To look around my cube there's a few other smaller figures: a wendigo (the Hannibal Wendigo specifically from the ended-too-soon tv show...

This is one of those sort of doomsday/apocalypse kind of thoughts. But due to some of the story in Jessica Jones, I've been thinking about how and where I would run if the worst happened. Like if you ABSOLUTELY have to go somewhere because your personal FBI guy decides to turn you in or you commit a crime you want to get away from or there's a super-villain after you (or a superhero, who am I to dictate what kind of super you want to be).... whatever, we all have our reasons. Specifically, I'm talking about the sort of running where technology works against you and where continuing to use your own identity is not an option. Where do you go and how do you get there? I'm pretty much of the thought that in this day and age, the average joe has no real choice but the streets in a major metropolitan city. I mean, it's sort of the sad conclusion of modern society that it's easiest to hide in a crowd of people that people actively look away from.  Th...

I managed to finish Jessica Jones Season 2 tonight and as the title might suggest, I'm not really sure how I feel about it. I didn't watch The Defenders (maybe I'll get back to it, but it's not a priority) so I'm not sure how well any of it ties in, or doesn't, to what happened there. Although I feel like it's probably pretty stand-alone from it, given that the only real ties I saw/heard in season two related to Jeri. For a pretty spoiler-free review I can say that I both enjoyed Jessica's progression in this season and what the focus was for her with Kilgrave out of the picture. I can also say that it's pretty freaking cool that they employed female-only directors for Season 2, however there was also a long way they could've gone to improve some of their diversity issues. Black women specifically got an unfair shake on screen and in ways that absolutely could've gone any direction. It's not enough to cast black actors, there's no ...

I'm happy to see new music from Pentatonix that isn't Christmas, or personal projects. Not that they're not all extremely talented on their own, but after Ari left, I wondered what new music from them might look like. Their cover for Havana is good, but this new song is a little bit of a return to some of their older sounds - new music mixed with an old beat. It also helps that I really, really dig New Rules from Dua Lipa right now. Putting the beat from Aaliyah's Are You That Somebody? just hits me where my teen-self lived, knee-deep in R&B. This is real good.

If you've never watched Hot Ones before, you're missing out on a great interview show. In it the host, Sean Evans, interviews a celebrity while they both take down ten chicken wings made with hot sauces of increasing intensity on the Scoville scale. Between each wing, Sean asks questions of his guests that are usually a little unique (like the format) and always entertaining. It also doesn't rely on 10-15 minutes of a guest plugging their latest project like on so many night time talk shows. Even at the end when Sean offers his guests a moment to plug whatever it is they want to -- rarely do the guests actually do so in a way that feels played out. The video below is the most recent episode where Charlize Theron takes the heat (like a champ) and is as charming and personable as I'd hoped she'd be. If you've never watched an episode, start with this one. Then, you've got more than a 100 episodes to watch back if you like the style.  

What is it about setting or deciding on a specific time to do something that seems to guarantee there's always ONE MORE THING that needs doing? I've tried to go to bed a little early every night this week and each time I feel like there's something I've forgotten to do. Last night I even tried to do it with plenty of time to finish what I was working on, let the dog out and take my meds -- all the normal stuff I do. And then of course I knocked over my drink as I was getting up from my desk. Usually it's the cats knocking my shit over. This time, my blanket knocked right into my open drink and spilled it all over my mouse and the books I keep by my computer at all times. But having to clean that up got me thinking how often I'm picking up stuff or doing one last thing before I go to bed. It's a little like playing The Sims or Civilization or whatever your RTS game of choice is, where you always want to take one more turn before saving and closing down your...

I'm not sure if I've learned my lesson about buying audiobooks just because I like the narrator. I picked up The Buried Book by D.M. Pulley after browsing through a bunch of the books narrated by Luke Daniels... which is not the first time I've picked up a book narrated by Luke Daniels just because. Let me back up. Luke Daniels is a fantastic narrator whom I once described to friend thusly: "I hope he has little kids that reads stories to at night doing all the voices." Not that his voice work isn't lovely, but somewhere out there I'd like to know there are some super lucky children getting to hear him do a variety of voices for Where the Wild Things Are or Harry Potter, or whatever. I listen to a lot of audiobooks -- I got so fed up with the radio in Kansas City about five years ago and switched over to audiobooks for my commute pretty much exclusively. Although even before that when my husband and I could commute together, we often had audiobooks pla...

Forever ago, Matt kickstarted the Halfsies dice campaign. We were able to pick up four sets of dice and I got the Superdice (blue and red) and the Davinci dice (black and gold). We just got them in the mail today, but I had a D&D game tonight so I was able to put my new Superdice to use on my earth genasi bard, Ariyaris. That's it. I just want to show of my new dice and say how well they did for me out of the box. Ari rolled two nat 20s tonight and at least one nat 12 for damage. So they're off to a good start. My Davinci dice might turn into my GM dice for the game I run on Wednesdays, as long as the cats don't bother me. They didn't seem to care for them tonight, but they almost always want to be on my desk when I'm surrounded by dice, books and notes. We would've had these dice long ago had some bad luck not befallen the nice guys at Gate Keeper Games in the form of a nasty fire just before GenCon last year. Thankfully, they've gotten things up a...

With the release of Dessa's new album, Chime, stories and videos of her process in writing the songs on it have been making the rounds. As a bit of a science nerd, she investigated the impact of love on the brain. Comparing her brain's reactions to images of an ex she couldn't quite shake feelings for and another person, she was able to see exactly where in the brain her feelings for this person lived. She talks about it more in the video below. I love Dessa's music, the lyrics in her songs deal not just with love but life. I've been listening to Chime for the past week or so and while I've not as in love with it as I have been with previous albums, I am thoroughly enjoying it. 

I had some friends in town overnight who had never seen The Good Place. However we started it pretty late in the night so they didn't make it very many episodes into the first season before everyone crashed. But as someone that doesn't rewatch very many shows, just getting a few episodes in to season one made me watch to continue. It's also really entertaining to watch the show with people who haven't seen it before, knowing exactly what they have to look forward to by the end of the first season. Even my expectations feel different despite knowing what's coming. There's so much about that first season I'd forgotten, especially about those first few episodes the prevalence of Michael's neurosis even before the reveal. (This won't be long, and I'm doing my best not to spoil anything specific, or the specifics about the end of Season One.) There's something about a show like this one where the end of Season One changes the show fundament...

Tonight we said goodbye to the toughest old lady I've ever met. When we adopted Piper no one was sure quite what her age was; we were told she was between five and seven years old. They knew she'd had puppies at some point not long before she'd been found and that her life up until she was rescued had been really tough. Her hair was thin, patchy and sun-bleached and it was clear she was scared around people and loud noises. We got Piper about a year and a half after our other lab, Jazz, and even though she was an older dog, the two of them were good friends. I remember taking Jazz to meet her for the first time and watching how they almost immediately fell into sync as they walked, as they sat, as they watched the world go by. They were a good fit for each other and for us. Two years ago we lost Jazz. And in recent weeks as Piper's health rapidly declined, I've felt like he's been here, with us. I've had these moments with her sitting next to me and as s...

Project Alpha has a show called Painter's Guild that's now in its second season. It's hosted by Will Friedle who is best known for his role as Eric on Boy Meets World, but who has also done a ton of VO work for DC in addition to be well known to the critter community as Kashaw on Critical Role. On Painter's Guild, Will and a guest dive into the world of miniature painting. Will, with no previous skill in the hobby, and his guest(s) who have been in the hobby for some time. The first few episodes of season one he started with Matthew Mercer (beloved DM of Critical Role) who showed him the basics of getting started. From there he had on other guests who are both advanced hobbyists or professional painters (which is such a cool job). In Season Two the show has recieved an upgrade both to the format and the studio setting. Now instead of a simple table, Will and his guest sit surrounding by a variety of paints and tools to use on their projects. In addition, mid-episode...